The invention relates to an information management system (“IMS” in short) for managing biochemical information.
Biochemical research brings tremendous amounts of data at a rate which has never been seen in any discipline of science. A problem underlying the invention relates to the difficulties in organizing vast amounts of rapidly-varying information. IMS systems can be free-form or structured. A well-known example of a free-form IMS is a local-area network of a research institute, in which information producers (researches or the like) can enter information in an arbitrary format, using any of the commonly-available or proprietary applications programs, such as word processors, spreadsheets, databases etc. A structured IMS means a system with system-wide rules for storing information in a unified database.
A problem with a structured IMS is that it may not accommodate new types of information, or entering new types of information may require various work-around techniques. On the other hand, a free-format IMS suffers from the drawback that external knowledge may be needed to interpret the stored information. This means, for example, that a document of an experiment contains numerical values, but the full meaning of the numerical values and/or the arrangement of the experiment is not included in the document. Or, if the experiment is thoroughly documented, the document is likely to be very long and ambiguous.